DAVID Cameron yesterday admitted that giving prisoners the right to vote makes him feel “physically ill” – but conceded he was powerless to act.

Amid growing fury at a decision by the European Court of Human Rights that a voting ban was illegal, the Prime Minister said the UK had no choice but to lift the voting ban because of the potential cost of defying it.

The revulsion caused by the move was also dramatically underlined by the mother of a murdered child as the killer – her brother – went to court to fight for his right to vote.

A judge in the case acknowledged that people might feel it was “repugnant to good citizens” to give the vote to a murderer.

The European Court ruled in 2004 that the UK’s 140-year-old blanket ban on letting sentenced prisoners vote was illegal.

The Government has now said it has no choice but to comply, because of the huge legal and compensation costs facing taxpayers. Around 1,000 inmates have already launched legal challenges. The killer fighting for his right to vote is Peter Chester, 55, also known as Peter Chester Speakman. He is serving life for raping and strangling his seven-year-old niece, Donna Marie ­Gillbanks, in Blackpool in 1977.

His QC told three Court of Appeal judges that denying him the vote was “disproportionate” and violated his human rights. June Gillbanks, 57, Donna’s mother and Chester’s ­sister, said she would write to Mr Cameron urging him “to look after people like me – the victims, instead of the criminals”.

She added: “It is just not right and it is not right that taxpayers’ money is used to deal with this. He gave up the right to vote when he strangled and raped my daughter.

“Where are my daughter’s human rights?” The court reserved judgment. Appeal judge Lord Justice Laws said: “Some people say [the view] that a person who commits a pre-meditated murder has so far turned his back on the company of good citizens that to give him the vote is repugnant is a viable point of view.”

Mr Cameron voiced his exasperation at Commons Question Time, telling MPs: “It makes me physically ill to even contemplate having to give the vote to anyone in prison. This is costing us potentially £160million, so we have to come forward with proposals because I don’t want us to spend that money – it’s not right.

“Painful as it is, we’ve got to sort out yet another problem left to us by the last government.”

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